Stats and Rap

It’s a Stoner’s Night

Such a beautiful song. Juicy J is incredible at consistently hitting the listener with bars that fit perfectly in the space provided by the beat. What I mean by this is that, on a bar-by-bar basis, his lines are consistent in length. It’s one of the things that made Lemonade such an awesome track. So I decided to calculate the variance of bar length. Variance is defined as:

a measure of how far a set of numbers are spread out from each other.

The smaller the number, the more consistent the track. Here’s some numbers from random songs:

Notice Juicy J and Gucci, bother hovering around 1.40 in syllable variance, are the lowest by quite a lot. I think this is a trend we’d see over a big sample size. Gucci and Juicy J’s sound is largely characterized by their writing styles. There’s a rhythm built by this repetition and structure that’s very fun to listen to.

50’s number surprised me but it makes sense. Unlike Gucci, 50 operates between a singy-songy voice and a rap voice in his rapping bars. So, while a rapping couplet might be on average about 15 syllables long, he’ll have a few rhyming bars that are 8 to 10 syllables long. He maintains rhythm by switching to a singy song voice. In If I Can’t:

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2 thoughts on “It’s a Stoner’s Night”

[…] together rhythmically, it’d be fun. His lines are really short (~9 syllables/line) and the variation in line length is huge. His syllable per line variance is ~3.12 syllables. This shows that, even with short lines on […]